Translator: Sue Kronenfeld Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Hello everyone.
First of all, I wanted to tell you
that I really never would have thought that I would stand before you.
No, because I am neither a sociologist, nor a scientist, nor a researcher.
In common parlance, you could say I'm a graffiti artist.
No, really I'd never have thought that I'd be speaking to you.
Plus, I must add that this began rather badly.
When I was a child,
I was born into a family that was pretty poor, violent,
and especially illiterate.
No one in our house had stayed in school after age 14.
No one.
To complete the picture, my mother had me at age 13.
That's young.
Moving a little further on,
she committed suicide when I was five and she was 18.
They explained this whole mess to me when I was 14.
It didn't go so well.
As far as schooling goes, since we're at TEDx University,
I was sent to school a bit late, at age seven.
It was pretty hard to be sociable with the other children.
They soon frightened me. I had almost never seen other kids.
It was pretty tough.
I took up a spot in the back of the classroom.
At least, the teacher kindly placed me there,
since I was the last to arrive.
And I remained in the back of the classroom
for absolutely all my schooling, right up until the last day.
As a teenager, then, when my family explained to me
about the brothel where I was born,
I naturally became a drug addict,
along with all that went with it: the delinquency, the humiliation...
badaboom, badaboom, badaboom, badaboom.
Then I decided to rebel.
I had not decided to change the world,
or to lead a revolution-- not at all.
I didn't even really try to change myself,
because I thought that it was already too late.
No, I only tried one thing. I tried to hope.
I became convinced that I could hope a lot.
I even believed I could dream.
Now, to dream is a great treasure.
A very great treasure.
As the preceding speaker said so well,
all those who have succeeded, have hoped.
Even those who have failed, have hoped.
So it is very, very great treasure.
In order to hope, to dream, somewhere you need
to have a great emptiness in yourself.
First, you have to give up. You have to give up your ideals.
Ideals are often rigid, stillborn, sterile things.
It's like a dream instilled in us from the outside.
No, in general, an ideal is sterile.
To dream, you need to leave room in yourself
to try to give space to the positive things
that might happen to us.
To dream, you have to accept what reality offers you,
and not what you would impose on reality.
To hope, somewhere you have to think,
"Maybe what is going to happen to me will be better than what I imagined."
Well, I dreamed a lot in the back of the classroom.
When I started graffiti, or "tagging", as we say,
I was about 15.
No, I would never have imagined that I could make a career of that.
At the time, it was unthinkable.
In 1989, when I got my first spray can for tagging,
I never would have believed I could make a career of it.
At the time, it wasn't a career yet; that didn't exist.
We did it for fun. We did it to show off.
To impress girls a little.
But never with the idea of making a career out of it.
To make an analogy,
it's a little like telling a teenager to get into burglary,
so as to become a better locksmith.
No, that doesn't exist.
So when I started,
I never could have imagined that 20 years later,
as it was so well said in my town,
when the police check me out because I'm painting,
they stop to ask me for an autograph.
That has happened.
I would never have imagined that 20 years later,
that in Barcelona, a judge in his jurisdiction
would release me for having painted on the electrical equipment,
and even better, would ask me to come back to beautify his town.
That has happened.
No, I'd never have imagined that.
And when I began stenciling,
not too long ago, in 2006,
even the taggers scorned me, and said,
"Stencils were made for decorating kitchens!"
Oh, yeah.
No, I'd never have believed, at that time,
they said it wasn't art.
However, nevertheless, it has happened.
And in particular, it happened
at the birth of my daughter, Nina, whom you see here,
because I wanted to show my child
a positive view of her father,
and also an optimistic vision of life.
So in some way, I wanted to show her
the best side of my personality.
And yet, I've had to get used to it.
It has happened.
It's happened-- the mayors of the whole world today
have their secretaries write to offer me walls to scribble on,
at their expense.
Yes, it's like that.
Indeed, it has happened that they pay for my plane tickets
to bring me to do a little tag on a street corner.
That's happened. I've had to get used to it.
And I have a hole there.
All that, just to tell you that, if at some point,
you might have been considered disturbed... or abnormal,
maybe you were just different.
And maybe if you had other people place you like that,
at the back of the classroom, maybe that makes sense for you.
Because deep down, what is that but being an artist,
what is it, but dreaming?
Dreaming a little, for the others,
dreaming for oneself, dreaming of oneself.
Because that, in some way, is an odyssey.
It's a personal odyssey.
It is giving birth to oneself, giving birth to the world.
In my case, it's transforming a dilapidated door,
with graffiti tags, with stickers,
something neglected, a bit like an abandoned child.
It's transforming that useless and ugly thing
into a pretty thing,
that people want to make their own,
that they want to take care of,
that they want to keep with them.
It's transforming the most useless thing
into the most precious thing.
Being an artist is that, too.
So to get there, you have to dream a lot.
You have to dream, and make others dream.
So you have to be part clown, part magician,
to be able to please the crowd, to impress the class.
To be an artist, deep down, is to dream for others.
To dream, but at the back of the classroom.
So if you were born holding a losing hand,
if you were told you were abnormal, don't believe a word of it!
I repeat: it's because you were different.
If they said you had your head in the clouds,
looking out the window, thinking of other things,
it was just that you were dreaming.
Never give up your dreams and your passions,
because it is dreams and passions that create
the most beautiful things in this world.
Thank you.
(Applause)